Making up the difference women, beauty, and direct selling in ecuador

Marjorie began her work life in the formal sector, as an offi ce employee, and now earns an income by selling for a handful of direct sales companies, including Yanbal, as ev-idenced by

B O O K S A B O U T W O M E N A N D FA M I L I E S, A N D

T H E I R C H A N G I N G R O L E I N S O C I E T Y

Women, Beauty, and Direct Selling in Ecuador

U N I V E R S I T Y O F T E X A S P R E S S Austin

and Annie Temple; Larry Temple; the Temple-Inland Foundation; and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Copyright © 2011 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2011

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

Permissions University of Texas Press P.O Box 7819

Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html

○ ∞ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

L I B R A R Y O F C O N G R E S S C A T A L O G I N G - I N - P U B L I C A T I O N DA T A Casanova, Erynn Masi de, 1977–

Making up the difference : women, beauty, and direct selling in Ecuador / Erynn Masi de Casanova — 1st ed.

p cm — (Louann Atkins temple women & culture series ; bk 25) Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-292-72386-3 (cloth : alk paper)

1 Direct selling—Ecuador 2 Women—Employment—Ecuador

3 Women—Ecuador—Economic conditions 4 Cosmetics industry—

Ecuador I Title.

HF5438.25.C3646 2011 381′.456685509866—dc22

2011000794 ISBN 978-0-292-73483-8 (E-book)

f o r m a r i l y n a n d “ b i g f r a n k ”

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction: Avon Ladies in the Amazon? 1

PA RT I Gender Relations: Women, Men, and Work

Productive and Reproductive Work 25

and Drivers 52

PA RT I I The Look: Images of Beauty, Professionalism,

and Success

and Class in Yanbal’s Catalogs 89

Yanbalista Image 116

c h a p t e r 5 The Picture of Success: Prizes and Status in the Direct Sales

Organization 138

PA RT I I I Direct Selling in Context: Careers and Consumption

Products?: Women’s Work Experiences in Context 157

“I A M F R OM E L G UA S M O, and I’m not embarrassed to say so,” began

María Bustamante, as she stood in front of a gathering of women direct

sellers in Guayaquil, Ecuador, to make an announcement El Guasmo is

Guayaquil’s most well-known poor neighborhood, located at the extreme

southern end of the city Although the infrastructure of El Guasmo has

improved greatly since my fi rst visit to the area in 1999, with many newly

paved streets and small palms planted in the median, and fewer open sewage

ditches, the neighborhood still lags behind other areas of the city María,

who sells products for a direct sales company called Yanbal,1 lives on one of

El Guasmo’s many unpaved streets; her home, like countless others, does

not have running water in the kitchen She lives on the same block as a few

other sellers from her group, and very near her grown son and

daughter-in-law and their two young children Before joining Yanbal, María was

a housewife, though she had completed a few years of college before her

children were born Getting together enough food to feed the family is

a challenge for many families in María’s neighborhood About one-third

of Guasmo residents earn below the monthly minimum wage, which was

$200 per month in 2008 Although unemployment is high (12 percent for

those aged eighteen through twenty-nine), more than a third of women

(36.6 percent) are employed This high rate of female participation in the

paid labor force, relative to that of other neighborhoods, may be correlated

with the high proportion of female-headed households: more than 30

per-cent of homes in El Guasmo are led by women Many women are active in

informal selling, making up part of the 55 percent of neighborhood

resi-dents involved in informal employment.2 (Informal employment is

under-stood here as that which is generally not regulated by the state, includes no

legal protections, and is not based on a formal contract between employer

and employee.)

A F T E R T H E DU S T Y, U P H I L L WA L K to Narcisa Pazmiño Beltrán’s

cement-block house from the pharmacy where the taxi had dropped me off, Narcisa

showed me the box cutter she was carrying for protection, hidden between

the pages of the glossy, four-color catalog she used to sell cosmetics This

shouldn’t have surprised me, given the worried look on the taxi driver’s

face as he drove away When I had asked him to drive me to Bastión

Popu-lar, a neighborhood at the northern fringe of Guayaquil, he was surprised,

saying I didn’t look like I was from that area When I explained I was

meet-ing a friend, he warned me to be careful as there were “bad people” in the

neighborhood Poverty is common in Bastión, with more than one-third

of residents earning less than minimum wage One of the ways that

Nar-cisa generates income is through her work with Yanbal, selling perfume,

makeup, jewelry, and other personal care products Because Bastión

Pop-ular is relatively isolated in terms of public transportation, Narcisa has to

take two buses and travel two hours to get from her home to visit clients

in the downtown area Because of this geographic marginality, formal

em-ployment is scarce for Bastión residents; yet unemem-ployment levels are

com-parable to those in more prosperous parts of the city, due to the

whop-ping 55 percent of people working in the informal sector As in other parts

of Latin America, informal employment has been on the rise in Ecuador,

largely because of the work of women like Narcisa

R E L A T I V E T O “M A R G I N A L” N E IG H B OR HO OD S such as El Guasmo and

Bastión Popular,3 the Barrio del Seguro, where Marjorie González lives

with her husband and two young sons, is much more comfortable, with

paved streets and some large fi nished houses Marjorie’s home is a

high-ceilinged, ground-fl oor apartment next door to a school When I

vis-ited her for the fi rst time on a sunny afternoon in late 2007, many of the

school’s uniformed female students were milling about in the street, which

was closed to traffi c; their giggling and socializing could be heard from a

block away El Barrio del Seguro belongs to a category of neighborhoods

that the INEC calls “consolidated areas,” meaning that basic infrastructure

and services (telephone lines, garbage pickup, running water, and

electric-ity) are reliable The consolidated areas of the city include several of the

es-tablished neighborhoods, or ciudadelas, in the northern part of Guayaquil,

most of downtown, and a few other regions When statistics are consulted,

the portrait that emerges of the wide swath of the city considered

“consol-idated” is one of relatively high levels of education, employment (including

among women), and informal sector employment Marjorie began her work

life in the formal sector, as an offi ce employee, and now earns an income

by selling for a handful of direct sales companies, including Yanbal, as

ev-idenced by the array of products displayed prominently in a glass-fronted

cabinet in her dining room

T H E R E S E A R C H P R E S E N T E D I N T H I S B O OK represents a foray into

what sociologist Mitchell Duneier (1999) has called the “extended place

method” of ethnographic fi eldwork Rather than being a traditional

eth-nography based in one research site, this study refl ects the working

con-ditions of women selling cosmetics and other products for a transnational

corporation, as well as my preference for following direct sellers through

the city as they went about their daily life I learned a great deal about the

study’s participants when we attended meetings or spent time in sales

di-rectors’ offi ces together In addition, I was able to get a deeper

understand-ing of the social and physical spaces they occupied by accompanyunderstand-ing them

on walks through their neighborhoods, on visits to clients (which

some-times took place during such walks), or to social gatherings

Although I felt I knew the city of Guayaquil, having spent time and

con-ducted research there on and off since 1999, the Yanbalistas (Yanbal sellers

and sales directors) opened my eyes to the tremendous geographic—as well

as social and economic—distances that guayaquileños (residents of

Guaya-quil) cross in order to make a life for themselves and their families These

Yanbalistas include women like Narcisa Pazmiño, who, in the course of a

typical day’s work, travels from her home in the marginal northern

neigh-borhood of Bastión Popular (the poetically named “People’s Fortress”) to

visit clients downtown and in the south of the city, and then back to

north-ern Guayaquil to place an order at her director’s home offi ce When my

feet were tired, Narcisa found the energy to keep going; this

crisscross-ing of the city is what puts food on many tables Thus it is not place as such

that interests me, but rather the places that people hold within webs of

so-cial connection that span and sometimes overrun the space of the city My

approach to ethnography also put all of my interactions in the fi eld (in

Ec-uador and especially Guayaquil) under a sociological microscope, so that

any time Yanbal came up in conversation, the discussion became data that

fed my knowledge of this social world I found out that nearly everyone I

met, from a professor of economics at a local university to the woman who

ran the stationery store on the block where I lived for several months, had

a family member involved in direct selling or had been involved as either a

client or a seller By always keeping my eyes open for where Yanbal might

appear, I was able to go beyond the social networks where my research

be-gan and discover other points of view

DU R I N G A P P R OX I M A T E LY F I V E M ON T H S in the fi eld between

Septem-ber 2007 and June 2008, I was a daily or near-daily presence in the offi ce

of Yanbal group #105 and at this group’s events in Guayaquil, led by Ligia

García de Proaño, my husband’s aunt The offi ce was located on the second

fl oor of a six-story upscale professional offi ce building in northern

Guaya-quil, across the street from a major mall In the air-conditioned offi ce and

conference rooms, I acted as a sometime offi ce assistant: answering phones;

proofreading letters and e-mail messages; entering orders into the online

system; helping prepare meetings, presentations, and prizes; setting up and

running laptop computers and projectors during meetings; and assisting

during meetings in various ways When not in the offi ce, I attended

meet-ings at other directors’ offi ces or at Yanbal’s corporate offi ces in Guayaquil,

spent time with “beauty consultants” (distributors, or low-level sellers) and

sales directors in their homes, or accompanied them while they worked

Over time, I moved deeper into the social world of the direct selling organization, going beyond the duties of researcher and ad hoc assistant

New activities included singing and dancing to the Yanbal anthems played

at events, which I came to know by heart Along with Ligia’s daughter,

Johanna, I choreographed and led a dance routine at the annual

Christ-mas party for consultants in group #105 At another ChristChrist-mas party, for

the directors in Ligia’s “family” network, I was asked to give a brief talk,

speaking about micro-sociology and gendered communication styles to the

nearly one hundred women in attendance Some women from other groups

who did not know me well simply assumed that I was a consultant or

direc-tor or a part of Yanbal’s corporate staff

The event during which I felt most like a participant and least like a searcher was the national convention for the company’s top directors, held

re-in Guayaquil re-in the sprre-ing of 2008 Invited to attend the convention by the

company’s general manager in Ecuador, I was the only nonstaff attendee

who had not earned the right to attend through a year of hard work A

somewhat uncomfortable feeling, of intruding on something that others

had won, hung over me during the fi rst day of the three-day event By the

end of the convention, however, that feeling had dissipated somewhat I

learned dance routines and the convention song along with the women;

pushed my way to the front of lines just as the veteran convention-goers

did; enjoyed some of the training/motivational sessions so much that I

sim-ply forgot to take notes; overate; and danced until my feet were swollen

Direct selling organizations (DSOs) like Yanbal are often described as

“feminine” organizations, a characterization that made sense to me after

attending the convention That I was six months pregnant at the time made

making new acquaintances, especially among the dozen or so pregnant

di-rectors, much easier than it would have been otherwise In two pregnancies,

I had never before been so aware of my visibly pregnant body in

interper-sonal interaction Although it may seem counterintuitive, being pregnant

among fi ve hundred women, most of whom have children, made me a

mi-nor celebrity Combined with my being a foreigner and a student

research-ing Yanbal’s sales force, my round belly drew women to me; some launched

into stories about their trajectory with the direct selling organization or

their groups, and some wanted their photos taken with me While I had

found that being a mother had helped me create rapport with the women I

met during my research,4 I did not usually have my son physically with me

when I was in the fi eld,5 so that my motherhood was more symbolic or

ab-stract Being pregnant brought my identity as a mother to a concrete,

phys-ical level, which heightened women’s response to me; everyone wanted to

touch my belly, share a childbirth story, or give a piece of advice

I do not wish to make too much of my inclusion in the social world of

Yanbal and its sales force Several obstacles and power imbalances set me

apart from the women I was studying, distancing me from them and

mak-ing rapport more diffi cult to achieve The fi rst of these challenges was the

double-edged sword of my connection to sales director Ligia García

With-out this key informant and expert in all things Yanbal, and her

generos-ity and openness, it would have been impossible for me to conduct this

re-search However, she is a highly visible and prominent person within this

direct selling world In many situations, my association with this successful

and infl uential sales director and my identity as her “niece” outweighed my

foreignness and my status as a student or researcher

This personal connection had a diverse range of perceptible effects

Many people praised Ligia when speaking with me, calling her a role model

or a leader, whom they viewed with respect, admiration, and deference

Some consultants and directors revealed things to me that they thought

Ligia might disapprove of, quickly following these revelations with

com-ments such as “Ligia doesn’t know this” or “Don’t tell la señora Ligia.”

Al-though she has no direct or enforceable authority over consultants or other

directors, Ligia’s opinion carries weight with these women Based on her

previous behavior or comments, sellers and directors felt that they could

predict her reactions to their claims or activities In a few cases,

consul-tants who knew of my closeness to Ligia asked me to try to infl uence her on

some small matter

In addition to this high-profi le connection with one of the country’s

most successful Yanbal directors, my identity as a North American, a

gringa, distanced me from the research subjects In this role, I was

some-times viewed and treated as a source of information and possibly money

Being from the United States takes on additional meanings in the context

of Ecuadorian migration to my country, which is a long-standing pattern

that has accelerated in recent years One direct seller asked me if I could

help her fi nd her brothers, who had migrated to the United States and

got-ten “lost,” disconnected from the family in Guayaquil Another asked my

advice as she struggled with the decision of whether to send her

four-year-old granddaughter, whom she was raising, to live with her paternal

grand-parents in New York

Another woman joked that she wanted to move to the United States and become my domestic employee, a joke that felt hollow, as if an invita-

tion from me could instantly make this far-fetched idea a reality This made

me feel uncomfortable and shattered for me any illusion of rapport that

could reach across socioeconomic or national differences in this particular

interaction This woman was also the most excited about the modest

hon-orarium I gave to interviewees, recommending no fewer than three of her

“daughter” consultants to be interviewed, in what I perceived as an effort

to spread the gringa’s money around within her social network In fact, my

decision to give sellers money to compensate them for the time they spent

with me in interviews was generated by my consciousness of the economic

chasm between us, a situation in which what represented a manageable

ex-pense to me was a signifi cant amount of money to them Ironically, I am

not sure whether this monetary gift did not, in some cases, simply call

at-tention to our differences in resources and status

E AC H O F T H E T H R E E PA R T S of this work examines direct selling in

Ecua-dor from a slightly different angle Taken together, these sections represent

an in-depth exploration of a social world that is unique, yet can illuminate

our understandings of work and gender in Ecuador and other developing

countries

The fi rst part presents a gender relations perspective on direct selling

Chapter 1 uses the experiences of women to critique the image, promoted

both by direct sales organizations and by the academics who study them,

of direct selling as the ideal work for women seeking to balance paid

em-ployment with domestic responsibilities Chapter 2 focuses on the role of

men, whose direct and indirect involvement in this economic activity, on

their own or in relation to female partners, shapes the work of direct

sell-ing in Ecuador

Part II discusses the emphasis on image within this cosmetics DSO

Chapter 3 uses qualitative content analysis to examine the messages of

beauty, gender, race, and class conveyed through the visual and textual

lan-guage of Yanbal’s sales catalogs The cultural valuation of whiteness and

upper-class status is juxtaposed with the phenotypic and fi nancial realities

of most Ecuadorians Chapter 4 looks at how the idealized image of the

Yanbalista is constructed through both offi cial training materials and

in-terpersonal interactions among women affi liated with the DSO This

chap-ter considers how cultural norms of feminine appearance are related to the

material conditions in which women live and work Chapter 5 uses

ethno-graphic data to show the importance of images of success and status within

the DSO, which is structured around prizes, contests, and effusive

recogni-tion of top performers

Part III places the experiences of women direct sellers in the context

of labor and consumption in contemporary Ecuador Chapter 6 attempts

to answer the question of what women would be doing if they were not

working in direct sales This hypothetical question leads to a discussion of

work histories, multiple income-earning strategies, and future career plans

of direct sellers These experiences are considered in the context of

expand-ing informal employment, the lack of part-time work in the formal

sec-tor, and employment discrimination Chapter 7 attends to the

consump-tion piece of the direct sales picture, since every act of selling is also an act

of buying The ways that direct sellers manage customers and determine

payment structures are explored here, and the perspectives of clients are

in-cluded The background for these informal exchanges is the expansion of

consumption in urban Ecuador and Guayaquil in particular, which I have

witnessed in a decade of conducting research there

The conclusion relates the study’s fi ndings to the social scientifi c

liter-ature on gender, work, and globalization and reiterates the ways in which

cultural norms and material conditions interact to shape the world of direct

sales in Ecuador and women’s experience of it

E D I TO R I A L CO N V E N T I O N S US E D I N T H IS B O O K

All the names used in this book are real, except where noted (one change

was made to protect the individual from the possible negative consequences

of sharing his story) Given the choice between using their real names and

using pseudonyms, the participants in this study elected to be identifi ed

I concur with Linda Seligmann, who wrote regarding her decision not to

use pseudonyms: “These are real people; others can talk to them, and they

can talk back We live in the same world” (2004, 11) In Ecuador, people

have two legal surnames: one from their father, followed by one from their

mother For example, if a woman’s mother was named Alexandra González

Martínez and her father was Alonso Herrera Comín, she would be María

Herrera González Thus, maternal surnames usually drop out of use after a

generation Married women generally continue to use the same last name(s)

all their lives, although some keep their paternal surname and add the

prep-osition “de” and their husband’s paternal surname To give an example of

this, if María Herrera González married Juan Santos García, she could

re-fer to herself as María Herrera de Santos She would most likely keep the

surnames she was born with in legal documents, however To make

mat-ters a bit clearer, I tend to use both surnames the fi rst time I introduce a

study participant in these pages, and only the fi rst surname thereafter For

women who use the married form of their name, I refer to them by that

en-tire name or simply use fi rst and last (maiden) name When interviewees

gave me only one last name, I present their name as they initially reported

it to me, respecting their self-representation, even if I had access to records

listing both of their last names

In terms of the written representation of language in this book, all lations are mine, and I have included the original Spanish text in brackets

trans-in places where I felt it was important to show the colloquial expression or

maintain the fl avor of the person’s speech—places in which I would, as a

bi-lingual reader, be wondering about which words the subject used, exactly

Regarding quotations of participants’ statements, in instances where I

am certain about the exact wording of participants’ speech (from

transcrip-tion of recorded interviews or verbatim quotes written down immediately),

I have either formatted their words as block quotations or enclosed them in

standard quotation marks In cases in which I wrote up participants’ verbal

expressions at the end of the day in fi eld notes and cannot be certain of the

exact wording, I have enclosed their words in single quotation marks In

these instances, I am confi dent that the meaning of the utterances remains

more or less unchanged, although I cannot claim that the exact wording is

consistent with what was said

N OT E S

1 The term “direct sales” is defi ned as a means of distributing branded products that uses person-to-person sales as opposed to fi xed retail locations Common examples

of direct sales organizations include Avon, Tupperware, and Amway.

2 All the statistics cited in the preface are drawn from the ESIS (Encuesta del Sistema

de Información Social) survey published on CD-ROM by the National Institute of

Sta-tistics and the Census (INEC) in 2007.

3 The term “marginal,” which is taken from the colloquial Spanish marginal, refers

to neighborhoods that are both far from the center of the city and lacking in attention

from local, regional, and national governments.

4 See Mose Brown and Casanova (2009) for an in-depth discussion of the role of motherhood in fi eldwork interactions For other qualitative researchers’ recent refl ections

on the role of pregnancy and children in the fi eld, see Candelario (2007),

Friedemann-Sánchez (2006), and Reich (2003).

5 My four-year-old son, Joaquín, accompanied me to Guayaquil during the months

of research Although the unique experiences of having a child in the fi eld were often

challenging in the moment, we are now able to laugh at his shocked reaction to a strong

tremor that shook the city in October 2007, and our awful battle with head lice, which

dragged on for a month and a half.

I T M A Y BE C L IC H É T O S A Y that this book would not exist without the

in-put of many, many people, but I will say it anyway Unlike my often-hapless

New York Knicks, I have been fortunate to be associated with a winning

team in this endeavor Typing their names here is one small step toward

be-ginning to thank them for their kindness and support

First, my thanks go to the people who mentored me and contributed to

the development of this research project at the Graduate Center of the City

University of New York Mitch Duneier, the chair of my dissertation

com-mittee, encouraged me during my fi rst forays into ethnographic research

and taught me a great deal about how to do fi eldwork and write

ethnogra-phy His consistently high standards have challenged me to think about

eth-nography in terms of ethics, responsibility, and rigor and have shaped how I

approach qualitative research as a reader and a humble practitioner He says

that you can’t be afraid of people if you want to be an ethnographer, yet I

fi nd that ethnography is a way to overcome my fear of people; every time I

carry my little notepad or my voice recorder into the fi eld, the fear has to be

conquered anew (if only for the day) Hester Eisenstein pushed me to think

about the material conditions of women’s everyday lives and helped me

home in on feminist research and theories that were connected to my work

Her genuine excitement about the project helped me to believe that what I

was doing was doable after all Charles Green could always be counted on

to remind me of how corporate capitalism plays a role in the spread of

di-rect selling, and to keep an eye on how local and global ideas about race

infl uence identity construction and cultural representations Our leisurely

chats in his offi ce, with its spectacular views of Manhattan, often extended

beyond my research topics into sports, parenthood, and travel Other

sup-porters at CUNY have included Jack Hammond and Victoria Pitts-Taylor

Julia Wrigley read a complete early draft of the manuscript at a crucial

mo-ment and urged me to clarify my argumo-ment and develop the concepts

nec-essary to support it; throughout the dissertation process she served as an ad

hoc committee member, working in the shadows and helping provide me

with the big-picture perspective Fellow graduate students and alumni from

the Graduate Center must be tired of hearing about this project, but they

have listened, read, and helped me keep things in perspective; Carlene

Bu-chanan Turner, Joanna Dreby, Patrick Inglis, Soniya Munshi, and Andrea

Siegel must be thanked by name here

Outside of CUNY, Linda Seligmann, Florence Babb, Greta Sánchez, Marina Prieto-Carrón, and Leila Rodríguez Soto provided useful

Friedemann-feedback on parts of the project Adela de la Torre has always been ready

with letters of recommendation and professional advice Thanks also go to

Littisha A Bates and Amy Lind, who read the nearly fi nal draft and gave

me helpful comments Amanda Staight, who worked as my research

assis-tant in 2009– 2010, was a great help with organizing the manuscript,

in-dex, and bibliography I am grateful to my editor Theresa J May and the

team at University of Texas Press, who have been wonderful collaborators

in the production of this book

The second group that I must thank is composed of all the people who

helped me conduct my research in Ecuador A mis queridas Yanbalistas (y

ex-Yanbalistas): les doy un millón de gracias por su generosidad, humor, y

sin-ceridad: Martha Bermeo Bermeo, Betty Brigss Mantilla, Ana María

Brio-nes, María Bustamante, Nelly Cabrera, Carmen Carrillo, Carolina Cevallos

Plaza, Elizabeth Contreras, Érica de la A, Ramona Delgado, Carmen Díaz

Baldeón, Fanny Flores, Cecilia García Torres, Marjorie González, Diana

Hurel Molina, Mariuxi Hurel Molina, Gioconda Ibarra Ruiz, María

Li-tardo Santos, Marjorie López, Mercedes Mantilla Aguirre, Érika Martínez

García, Jacinta Menoscal, Sara Murillo Balladares, Maryuri Palma Pico,

Vanessa Paredes Márquez, Narcisa Pazmiño Beltrán, (Carmen) Patricia

Pé-rez Álava, Mary Sánchez, Daniela Solís NeváPé-rez, Nancy Torres Zambrano,

Sandra Vásconez Silva, (Mary) Belén Vera Marín, Micaela Vera Muñoz,

Jackeline Vivanco, “Carlos Zambrano,” Tania Zambrano Burgos, y

Nar-cisa Zambrano Valdez In Yanbal’s corporate offi ces, my thanks go to

Rob-ert Watson, Priscilla Molina, and Paulina Bueno, among others My hada

madrina (fairy godmother) always gives of her time and activates her social

networks to help me with whatever project I am working on: thank you,

Psc Irma Guzmán de Torres! At the Universidad Espíritu Santo (UEES) in

Guayaquil, I must thank Dr Albert Eyde and Econ Jorge Calderón

Sala-zar, as well as Mónica Rambay Thanks to Soc Roberto Sáenz of the

Na-tional Institute of Statistics and the Census (INEC) for sharing important

city- and neighborhood-level data on Guayaquil Oscar García helped me

understand the employment context in the city and on the coast Thanks to

BONIL, who allowed me to reproduce one of his works And to think of

the dozens of hours that my wonderful transcription team saved me:

Gian-nina Jaramillo, Jorge Mosquera, Anita Pereira, Catalina Plúa, Ing Byron

Ruiz Barroso, and the MVP of that team, Gabriela Salgado Coronel

Third, I must thank my family, extended family, and adopted family, here in the United States and in Ecuador This group includes my par-

ents, who have encouraged my intellectual curiosity to the point of

allow-ing me to read encyclopedias at the dinner table as a child and write a

re-search paper on hallucinogenic drugs in eighth grade (what must they have

thought of that topic choice?) Marilyn and Frank Masi, my grandparents,

have been a steady source of love, support, laughter, and music My

hus-band’s parents have helped smooth the way for my work in Ecuador from

the beginning The Lorca-Valdés family in New York graciously adopted us

and treated us to enough parrilladas to last a lifetime Thank you to the

“other mothers” whose dedication to my children throughout the

proj-ect and beyond has allowed me the quiet time necessary to write, read,

think, work, and sometimes just take a nap: gracias, Sra Pilar, Sra Gladys,

Sra María, and especially, Tía Lola Thanks to all of my familia política in

Guayaquil and Manabí and throughout Ecuador: Prima Johanna Proaño

García, Tía Fátima Casanova Bravo, tías, tíos, primos, primas, and Tía

Azu-cena Casanova Bravo, who will be missed Gracias a los primos Merizalde

Proaño por compartir su mamá y su casa con nosotros.

Tamara Mose Brown has accompanied me every step of this journey,

reading every word of the manuscript many times over She has been an

irreplaceable, and sometimes irrepressible, role model, critic, collaborator,

and friend, and I hope that she will continue to be Thanks to Trevor

Ja-son Brown and Marisa A Zapata for help with the images that illustrate

the book I also must thank Alisa Garni: comadre, sounding board, friend,

partner in anxiety and celebration I am grateful to Sodany Son and Mónica

Árciga for their loyal friendship through the years Thanks to Henry for

lis-tening to crazy brainstorms and methodological minutiae at all times of

day and night, for cheering me on, for keeping me sane, and for loving me

even when my mind was somewhere else I owe you more than I can repay

Joaquín and Soledad accompanied me to the fi eld, amaze me each day with

their beautiful minds and spirits, and—every now and then—test my

pa-tience ever so slightly

There are two women without whom this study, and this book, would

have been impossible A la Sra Ligia García de Proaño, gracias por

invi-tarme a conocer su mundo y por ponerme el ejemplo de cómo conseguir el éxito

e inspirar el respeto A la Sra Lola Proaño Yela, gracias por abrir su casa y su

corazón y por cuidarnos con tanta ternura Las quiero mucho.

PE R FUM E B E COM E S P O LI T I C A L

When the distributors and sales directors of Ecuador’s largest direct

sell-ing corporation, Yanbal, returned to work in early January 2008 after their

Christmas and New Year’s holidays, they encountered an unpleasant

sur-prise The administration of Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa Delgado,

had passed a wide-ranging tax reform law One provision of the new law

was the Impuesto a los Consumos Especiales (ICE), a tax on “special”

pur-chases Taxes were raised on goods and services that were perceived as

un-necessary for meeting basic daily needs, such as cigarettes, liquor, and

ca-ble television But the tax that directly affected Yanbal—and its more than

100,000 distributors—was the one on perfumes The original proposed

tax on perfumes had been 35 percent, but intense lobbying by Yanbal and

other affected parties brought the rate down to 20 percent, which was

ef-fective immediately upon passage of the law in the fi nal week of

Decem-ber 2007 The fi rst two weeks of 2008 were chaotic, as Yanbal

distribu-tors learned of the tax and had to pass the bad news on to customers A

tax of 20 percent increased the cost of some already costly perfumes by

$12 to $15, and the company’s online ordering system had to be

repro-grammed to automatically add in the tax, along with the existing sales tax

of 12 percent

The tax law was part of President Correa’s campaign to make the

coun-try’s traditional elites contribute more tax revenue, in an effort to

redistrib-ute wealth in Ecuador, which is ranked sixteenth in the world in terms of

income inequality (UNDP 2008).1 But Yanbal distributors and sales

direc-tors strongly objected to the portrayal of their products as luxuries for the

rich In an emotional letter to directors and salespeople, Yanbal Ecuador

re-iterated its Ecuadorianness, saying that the company was committed to the

AVO N L A DI E S I N T H E A M A ZO N?

development of the country and created jobs for Ecuadorians, not just as

distributors (sellers), but also as workers in the plants that produced some

of the products sold After meetings in Quito between government offi

-cials, Yanbal’s corporate executives, and high-ranking sales directors, some

directors took matters into their own hands, pushing for collective political

action The issue came to a head on January 25, when women direct sellers

took to the streets in Guayaquil (Ecuador’s largest city and the primary site

for this research) and Montecristi (the site of the Constitutional Assembly)

to protest the tax These sellers insisted that the fragrances they sold were

not special consumables but were for average Joes and Janes, not the

super-rich One sign at the Montecristi protest read: “The elites buy Coco

Cha-nel, but the majority buy national [Ecuadorian-produced] perfumes from

us” (El Universo 2008c) A cartoon in El Universo, the leading daily

news-paper in Guayaquil, poked fun at the new tax law, and specifi cally the idea

that only wealthy people use perfume (BONIL 2008)

For many Ecuadorians, perfume is viewed not as a luxury or optional

president’s administration In the magnifi ed portion of this cartoon depicting

the march, the association the ICE made between perfume consumption and

elite status is lampooned through the following dialogue: Marcher #1: “I think

there is a pelucón [a slang term coined by President Correa to denote wealthy

Ecuadorians] infi ltrator.” Marcher #2: “Why?” Marcher #1: “I smelled perfume.”

This cartoon appeared in El Universo on January 8, 2008 (Courtesy of BONIL,

Ecuadorian graphic humorist)

item but as a key element of everyday personal hygiene and acceptable

self-presentation Ecuadorians spend $13 million each month on perfumes,

much more than the $6.7 million they spend on cosmetics and the $5

mil-lion on soap (Escobar 2006a) As the most recognized purveyor of

per-fumes in the country, Yanbal stood to lose millions with the introduction

of the ICE

Yanbal and the people associated with the company found themselves at

the center of a political storm because of their dominant share of the

per-fume market They defended their right to be exempt from the tax by

high-lighting the humble origins of many distributors and consumers and

inter-preting perfume as a need rather than a luxury Ligia García de Proaño, my

husband’s aunt and a high-ranking Yanbal director, was so livid about the

new tax that she called a person who used to sell in her group, a military

man who was then working as President Correa’s bodyguard The

body-guard agreed to let Ligia know where the president could be found next

time he was in Guayaquil And one afternoon in late January, the supreme

strategist Ligia (along with her “mother” director2) made sure she was

eat-ing chicken alongside the president in a small restaurant in northern

Gua-yaquil When the ladies sidled up to Correa after his meal, they complained

about the tax He told them that he was familiar with their plight and that

the new tax on perfumes was a mistake that he intended to fi x

The president repeated this sentiment on his national radio show on

Feb-ruary 2, 2008, saying he had been meeting with representatives of Yanbal

in order to fi nd a way to keep perfume prices from changing, thereby

en-suring that the distributors’ “commissions weren’t hurt and that they

con-tinue selling and earning their little bit of money [su platita]” (El Universo

2008b) It is possible that the president downplayed the economic gain of

the women to make it seem like his modifi cation of the new tax policy was

of no great consequence By validating the assumption that sellers were

not earning much, however, Correa reinforced stereotypes that trivialize

this type of women’s work The idea implicit in his statement is that these

women are not supporting their families but just contributing a little

some-thing, making up the difference between the family’s income and

expen-ditures, or earning pocket money for themselves In the end, Yanbal’s staff

and sales force succeeded in lowering the ICE on many items and

eliminat-ing it on others; the tax was also added to the manufactureliminat-ing price rather

than the sale price of each item, lowering the amount paid and meaning

that less of the tax was passed on to customers Because the strong demand

for perfumes continued unabated as prices stabilized, sales were up to

re-cord numbers by the middle of 2008, although they later dropped.3

T H E PR E S E N T S T U DYThis book examines how cultural norms and material conditions shape Ec-

uadorian women’s direct selling work Cultural norms include socially

ac-cepted ideas about gender (femininity and masculinity), work, and family

The material conditions of women’s lives are an amalgam of socioeconomic

status/social class, income, social networks, and education In her

ground-breaking work The Second Shift, Arlie Hochschild introduced the concept

of “gender strategy,” defi ned as “a plan of action through which a person

tries to solve problems at hand, given the cultural notions of gender at play”

(2003 [1989], 15) In analyzing the experiences of urban Ecuadorians

in-volved in direct selling, I argue that women’s (and men’s) gendered economic

strategies represent the reconciling of cultural norms with material

condi-tions That is, gender strategies pertaining to income-generating activities

take into account not only the dominant cultural narratives of gender but

also the concrete socioeconomic situations in which individuals, couples,

and families fi nd themselves In some cases, as will be shown throughout

this book, cultural ideals are adapted, reshaped, or challenged by

individu-als’ gendered economic strategies due to the exigencies of survival within a

given set of material conditions and limitations Although the word

“strat-egy” implies a certain amount of choice (Benería 1992), choices are always

constrained, especially for the poorest members of society

The primary concern of this study, then, is to shine a spotlight on the interplay and connections between cultural norms and material conditions

and how these cultural, social, and economic “givens” frame women’s

eco-nomic activities, including direct selling Taking seriously the suggestions

for feminist research laid out by Mohanty—to explore “women’s own ideas

of their work and daily life” and begin to “take apart the idea of ‘women’s

work’ as a naturalized category” (2003, 74)—I examine the conditions of

women’s work in the sales force of a transnational corporation and relate

these conditions to ideas about gender roles

While I am primarily interested in showing women’s lives, work, and perspectives, I also use their stories to shed light on the paradox of Yan-

bal’s success in Ecuador’s unpredictable and sometimes downright chaotic

economy I asked executives in Yanbal Ecuador’s corporate headquarters

to explain why, out of the eight countries in which the company operates,

Ecuador consistently has had the highest sales volume.4 They responded

that, because of the country’s small size and high rates of poverty,

multi-national corporations have not seen expansion into Ecuador as profi table

With fewer cosmetics, fragrances, and personal care products coming in

from outside the country, Yanbal had an open fi eld in which to

manufac-ture, import, and distribute its products

Although I don’t dispute this claim, I argue that the fl exible nature of

this type of selling also allows people to access what are perceived as

high-quality products and leads to higher sales volume of Yanbal products than

many retail-based brands Simply put, clients can pay for their Yanbal

prod-ucts a few dollars at a time rather than having to come up with the entire

$50 cost of a perfume, an option that they do not have in many formal

re-tail settings Because the items sold by Yanbal are costly and valued

ele-ments of an attractive self-presentation, they are seen as desirable; because

they can be paid for over time, they become affordable This direct selling

organization (DSO) has managed to weather serious economic crises and

retain its sales force through the selling power of the brand, the

compa-ny’s ability to take advantage of social and cultural valuation of appearance

and hygiene, and fl exible payment arrangements between sellers and buyers

(discussed in detail in chapter 7) Yanbal benefi ts from the fact that many

Ecuadorians, as the protesters correctly claimed, see items like perfume as

necessary for daily life, not as a luxury for the elite

WOM E N A N D D I R E C T S E L LI N G I N T H E E CUA D O R I A N E CO N OMY

Ecuador is located in the northwestern corner of South America, between

the Pacifi c Ocean and the Amazon rain forest, and is bordered by two

other Andean countries, Colombia and Peru The population is currently

13.9 million, with more than 1.5 million (possibly as many as 2 million)

Ecuadorians reportedly living abroad; popular migration destinations

in-clude the United States, Spain, and Italy (Jokisch 2007; Jokisch and Kyle

2008) It is estimated that approximately two-thirds of the population are

of mixed ancestry (primarily European and indigenous); these

Ecuador-ians are referred to as mestizo by demographers and other social

scien-tists Another quarter of the population is said to be indigenous, although

these percentages are hotly debated in political and academic circles

Ap-proximately 5 to 10 percent of Ecuadorians are black, or Afro-Ecuadorian;

the national census, which most likely undercounts blacks, gave a fi gure of

4.9 percent in 2001 (Halpern and Twine 2000; INEC n.d.) The country

is divided into four distinct geographical or ecological zones: the Pacifi c

coast, the Andean region, the Amazon, and the Galápagos Islands The

capital city is Quito, but the most populous is Guayaquil, with just about

3 million residents in the metropolitan area A full 38 percent of

Ecuador-ians lived in poverty in 2006 (World Factbook 2008); and in Guayaquil,

87 percent were poor (Floro and Messier 2006, 235)

Ecuador has primarily been an agricultural society since its dence from Spain in 1822, and although import substitution industrial-

indepen-ization was attempted more than once (Weiss 1997), the country never

industrialized to the extent that some of the larger South American

na-tions did The focus on agricultural exports that essentially began with the

cacao boom of the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century has

re-appeared again in more recent periods, with export-oriented banana and

fl ower cultivation The discovery of oil in the Amazon region in the 1960s

and 1970s shaped economic development policies, funding development

programs that extended the life expectancy of Ecuadorian citizens,

in-creased school attendance, and reduced infant mortality, leading to the

as-sertion that “much of the oil income was well spent” (Moser 1993, 177)

Oil, along with bananas, is now one of the country’s largest export

sec-tors (Weiss 1997) Because of this orientation toward exports as the

pri-mary path to economic development, it can be argued that the Ecuadorian

state has evolved through “a transnational lens,” and this is especially true

of Guayaquil, historically and currently the country’s largest international

port (Goetschel 1999)

Guayaquil has historically been a magnet for migrants from other parts

of the country, in an urbanizing trend similar to that of other Latin

Amer-ican nations The population of Guayaquil more than doubled between

1960 and 1982 (from 500,000 to 1.2 million) and then nearly doubled

again between 1982 and 1988, rising to 2 million (Moser 1993, 179)

To-day about three-fi fths of Ecuador’s population lives in cities (Radcliffe

2008, 285) Much of Moser’s description of the city, written in the 1990s,

still holds true:

Guayaquil’s commercial activity is focused around the forty grid-iron blocks of the original Spanish city, which in the 1970s were encircled by inner city rental tenements To the north on higher ground are the pre-dominantly middle- and upper-income areas, while to the west and south are tidal swamplands which provide the predominant area for low-income

expansion Settlement of this peripheral zone, known as the suburbios

(lit-erally suburbs) occurred between 1940 and 1980 when the low-income population excluded from the conventional housing market invaded this municipal-owned swampland (1993, 179)

Thus, the increase in population has been accompanied by the city’s

“spa-tial expansion” (Moser 1993, 182) Since the geography of the area has

made expansion southward less feasible in recent years, a new ring of

lower-income settlements has risen outside of the well-to-do neighborhoods at

the city’s northern edges

Structural adjustment policies—changes in national economic strategies

and budget allocations—that were implemented in order to obtain

Interna-tional Monetary Fund loans in the early 1980s resulted in increased

unem-ployment, high infl ation rates, and a reduced social safety net, consequences

also seen in other parts of the world.5 These changes affected women

dif-ferently from men, adding to their unpaid work in the home and making

the household’s daily maintenance more diffi cult (Lind 2005; Moser 1997;

Pitkin and Bedoya 1997; Rodríguez 1994) Moser (1993) identifi ed three

groups of low-income women affected by structural adjustment in

Guaya-quil in the 1980s: those who were “coping,” those who were “burnt out,”

and those who were just “hanging on.” Structural adjustment also

contrib-uted to a rise in income inequality, and at one point in the early 1990s,

Ec-uador had the most skewed income distribution in Latin America (Weiss

1997, 17) Ecuador’s debt represented a higher proportion of its gross

do-mestic product than that in other indebted nations such as Brazil and

Mex-ico (ibid., 9)

In response to a crisis of foreign debt and radical fl uctuations in the

na-tional currency, the sucre, Ecuador adopted the dollar as its currency in

2000 (Beckerman and Solimano 2002) Although there are debates about

the effects of dollarization, Ecuadorians generally agree that goods and

services became more expensive after the switch to the dollar This

bene-fi ted some independent businesspeople, such as taxi drivers, who could now

charge a minimum of one dollar per trip Consumers saw their money

dis-appearing at quicker rates, however As a family member put it to me, “We

were talking calmly about thousands and millions [of sucres],” and all of

a sudden, something costing just one dollar seemed cheap People tell me

that they are still sometimes shocked when they translate dollar amounts

back into sucres and realize how much more everyday items cost relative to

pre-dollarization average prices.6 Most Ecuadorians did not benefi t from

dollarization, and it did not reduce infl ation as aggressively as it was

in-tended to do (Lind 2005, 137)

Since the 1999– 2000 economic crisis that led to the adoption of the

U.S dollar as Ecuador’s offi cial currency, the economy has experienced

growth, with signifi cant interruptions and a great deal of political

insta-bility (Beckerman and Solimano 2002) Current president Rafael Correa

Delgado was elected in 2006 on a platform of social programs funded in

large part by oil revenue, and a more defi ant stance toward international fi

-nancial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund Correa also

promised to rewrite the country’s constitution, a process undertaken by the

elected Constitutional Assembly; the fi nal document was approved by the

voters in 2008 (The Constitution had previously been rewritten in 1998.)

Much has been made of Latin America’s “turn to the left” in recent years,

and scholars debate the extent and consequences of the changes made by

leaders such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and

Ra-fael Correa in Ecuador It is unclear what effects new policy stances (such as

defaulting on debt and the nationalization of the petroleum industry) will

have for citizens

Although Ecuador was the fi rst country in Latin America to extend the vote to women, the country was a bit late (in comparison with its neigh-

bors) in developing a feminist movement (Rodríguez 1994) Women’s

movements have tended to focus on local and community issues, and the

lack of a powerful national movement means that smaller movements

“cre-ate diverse relationships with political parties, NGOs [nongovernmental

organizations], churches, and local governments” (Radcliffe 2008, 287)

Laws establishing sex-based quotas for candidates for elected offi ce have

been passed but not enforced, despite the inclusion of women’s rights

pro-visions in successive versions of the Constitution (ibid., 293) Recent

schol-arship has examined women’s social movements—some of which identify

themselves as feminist and some of which avoid that label—at both the

lo-cal and national levels (Lind 2005; Prieto 2005; Radcliffe and Westwood

1996; Rodríguez 1994) Most of the women in my study fi t Radcliffe’s

de-scription of Guayaquilean women who, disenchanted by political

corrup-tion and clientelism, “have disengaged from collective accorrup-tions, being forced

to ‘hang on’ to a precarious set of survival strategies” (2008, 287)

G LO B A LIZ AT I O N, I N F O R M A L S E C TO R G ROW T H,

A N D D I R E C T S A L E S

As in other Latin American countries, employment in the formal sector

in Ecuador has declined rapidly in the past few decades, and employment

in the informal sector has risen Informal work is “unprotected,” “neither

‘on the books’ of employers nor regulated by the state” (Poster and Salime

2002, 191) Examples of informal sector jobs include domestic service and

small-scale selling In Latin America around the year 2000, informal

em-ployment currently made up 51 percent of all nonagricultural emem-ployment,

and nearly 60 percent of working women in the region were engaged in

in-formal employment (ILO 2002) Although some new employment

oppor-tunities have emerged, as in the fl ower export sector, 6.1 percent of

Ecua-dorians were unemployed in November 2007 (the rate had dropped from

9.9 percent in January 2007), and 46 percent were underemployed (Gestión

2007, 82) By March 2009, with the spreading effects of the U.S economic

crisis, 14 percent of Guayaquil’s residents were unemployed, and nearly

51 percent underemployed (El Universo 2009) It is estimated that one

mil-lion Ecuadorians have emigrated just since 1999 in search of work in

coun-tries such as the United States, Italy, and Spain (Jokisch 2007) These

con-ditions are caused by internal economic dynamics and decisions made by

Ecuadorian politicians and businesses, by global economic processes, and

by international bodies and multinational corporations

Some scholars of globalization focus on the expansion of multinational

corporations from their bases in the “First World” into the “Third World”

(Salzinger 2003; Sklair 2000; Tabb 2001) Such growth is led by a

trans-national group of managers, chief executive offi cers, and fi nancial

advis-ers that Sklair (2000) has called the “transnational capitalist class.”

Multi-national corporations are often seen as pushing out domestic competitors

and taking advantage of lower labor and production costs in developing

countries to produce goods cheaply and export them to other countries,

thereby increasing profi t margins for owners and shareholders As

produc-tion facilities move across borders, so do the products of multinaproduc-tional

cor-porations, expanding the range of options for consumers in both poor and

rich countries Studies on global capitalist expansion that do not depart

from a feminist perspective often overlook the people involved, focusing on

the corporation or the domestic or global economy Feminist researchers

have assembled a growing body of micro-level studies of women

participat-ing in global processes, which have as yet had little impact on macro-level

theories of globalization (Freeman 2000)

When individual people (especially women) are the unit of analysis in

studies of economic globalization, the purpose is often to expose

exploita-tion or the mechanisms by which these workers are incorporated into

trans-national corporations Research has often examined the position of “Third

World” women workers vis-à-vis corporations headquartered in the United

States and Europe (Fernández-Kelly 1983; Freeman 2000; Sal zinger 2003)

Such studies illuminate the ways in which ideas about women workers that

originate outside the countries in which they work interact with

home-grown ideologies about women’s place in society These insights are

use-ful; however, they are limited in that they generally take into account only

women working in fi xed workplaces (e.g., factories, data processing centers)

that are part of the formal economy.7

While international fi nancial institutions and multinational corporations that fi t the traditional labor-capital model are major engines of economic

globalization, direct selling companies are increasingly crossing geographic

borders and tapping into a mostly female labor force using radically

dif-ferent methods from those of, say, the maquiladoras in export- processing

zones.8 Direct sales organizations, including Avon, Tupperware, and

Am-way, have been expanding into new markets in Asia and Latin America,

a strategy that has proved successful and profi table for these companies

(Cahn 2006; Hopkins 2007; Vincent 2003; A Wilson 1999) It is the work

of the millions of women in the sales forces of these companies that

gen-erates this profi t In the context of narrowing opportunities in the formal

economy, and the low status of many types of informal work, selling for a

transnational direct sales organization is often an appealing option

B ACKG RO U N D O N D I R E C T S A L E SDirect selling is the marketing of consumer goods by representatives

(known as distributors) of the producers of the goods to customers,

by-passing the typical system of fi xed retail locations.9 It is characterized as

a “low cost, low entry-barrier, business opportunity that allows

individu-als, mostly women, to work a fl exible range of hours selling branded goods

for commission” (Brodie, Stanworth, and Wotruba 2002, 70) The

elimi-nation of the overhead costs of retail stores allows direct selling

organiza-tions to return some of the profi t made on the products to distributors as

commission and can potentially increase the company’s profi ts over those

of a traditional retail operation In addition, since distributors are

nomi-nally self-employed, direct sales companies do not deal with payroll

admin-istration or offer benefi ts such as health insurance for the workers in their

sales force

When DSOs rely on current distributors and sales directors utors with advanced standing) to recruit new sellers, they are referred to

(distrib-as “network direct selling organizations” or “multi-level marketing

orga-nizations” (Brodie and Stanworth 1998; Cahn 2006) According to

Ni-cole Biggart, whose 1989 book Charismatic Capitalism: Direct Selling

Or-ganizations in America is probably the most well-known study of direct

sales in the United States, network DSOs are characterized by the creation

of “sponsorship lines that create fi nancial ties between distributors” and a

“formal status hierarchy” based on recognition, prizes, and titles The

net-work form of organization is now the most prevalent in direct sales Avon

and Yanbal are two such organizations, in which distributors who reach a

certain level gain a percentage of their recruits’ sales The distributors who

oversee these lower-level sellers are the “upline,” and the people they have

recruited form their “downline” (Biggart 1989, 16) Within this type of

organization, notes Pei-Chia Lan, distributors act as consumers, retailers,

and recruiters (2002, 169) In Yanbal, as in the U.S.-based Mary Kay and

other DSOs, the relationships between distributors are analogized to

fam-ily roles, so that a distributor is a “daughter” (hija) to her “mother

consul-tant” and “mother director” (madre directora), who recruited her into the

organization and continue to supervise and mentor her Subgroups of

dis-tributors (people connected by the same sponsor) are sometimes referred

to in industry parlance as “genealogies” and are depicted by family tree–

type diagrams in both the academic literature and administrative materials

produced by the corporations (Biggart 1989, 17; Lan 2002, 176) In many

cases, people who are family members in real life are also connected in

the DSO world, which is a unique feature of direct sales: “by distributing

their goods through vast networks of ordinary people, companies

ex-tend their reach into intimate spheres and personal relationships” (A

Wil-son 2004, 164)

Direct sales is a $113 billion business employing nearly 63 million people

worldwide, 80 percent of whom are women.10 In Ecuador in 2008, direct

selling brought in $400 million, with a sales force of 380,000.11 Despite

these impressive fi gures, it is generally agreed that the direct sales sector

ex-periences an annual turnover rate of 100 percent among distributors

(Big-gart 1989, 156; Cahn 2006, 129) High turnover can be explained in part

by the self-driven nature of the work and the lack of penalties for dropping

out Some turnover is seasonal; for example, some Ecuadorian women join

to earn enough money for Christmas gifts for their families, and then stop

selling once the holidays are over For network DSOs and dedicated

distrib-utors, this means that constant recruitment is required Most direct sales

companies offer distributors some type of training, ongoing assistance, and

support, often delivered by sales directors at support centers such as the

one Peter Cahn (2006) studied in Mexico and those that served as some of

my research sites for this book Events (meetings, seminars, parties) rely on

materials produced by the company to both sell products and recruit

tributors As Ara Wilson notes, “the direct sales mode is comprised of

dis-course: of messages conveyed in catalogues, sales techniques, inspirational

meetings, promotional materials, and advertisements” (1999, 78) These

texts draw on and create desire for products while also constructing

desir-able identities for consumers and sellers (Yanbal’s catalogs are analyzed in

detail in chapter 3.)

The academic literature on direct sales has signifi cant lacunae and itations There is a lack of ethnographic data, which means that we do not

lim-often see the everyday lives and perspectives of distributors Three

impor-tant aspects of direct selling merit further examination First, as feminist

scholarship has shown, socially constructed ideals of femininity in

male-dominated societies give rise to intricate rules regulating feminine behavior

and physical appearance Women transmit their class (and/or ethnic)

iden-tities and aspirations through dress and appearance There has yet to be an

in-depth study of a single cosmetics DSO, which is an ideal avenue for

an-alyzing the construction of femininity and the commodifi cation of beauty

in everyday life

Second, studies of women distributors have sometimes tended to look

at them as the prototypical actors of economic theory: as isolated,

autono-mous, rational individuals However, women are embedded in households

in which they have domestic responsibilities and must contend with the

de-mands of caring for husbands or partners and/or children Women’s

deci-sion to begin selling cannot be viewed outside of this context, especially in

societies with relatively rigid gender roles The perceptions of family

mem-bers and the negotiations that take place between them must be brought

more fully into the picture Since direct selling involves women from many

different social class backgrounds, by studying this type of work we can

also compare how work-family confl icts are dealt with in households of

dif-ferent socioeconomic statuses.12

Finally, with all the talk of selling in the literature on direct sales, sumption tends to get lost in the shuffl e Each act of selling is also an act

con-of buying, so why do scholars con-often talk only to sellers and not consumers?

The burgeoning social science literature on consumption—which largely

neglects direct sales—presents the opposite problem: a focus on

consum-ers to the exclusion of sellconsum-ers Each act of consumption is also an act of

sell-ing A study that draws on the insights of each approach can illuminate the

links between buying and selling in this personalized sales sector; to do

this, research must be conducted with consumers, and sales inter actions

must be observed, documented, and analyzed Of course, the argument

can be made (as in Cahn 2006) that most sellers begin as consumers, but

this is not a suffi cient exploration of the topic Why do some consumers

become sellers while others do not? How does the consumption of these

products fi t in with other consumption practices? How do social class,

so-cial networks, and gender come into play in buying and selling? Although

this study primarily focuses on sellers, it fi lls a gap in the literature on

di-rect selling by also conducting research with buyers in order to better

un-derstand the dynamic selling relationship

YA N B A L’S T R A J E C TO RY

It is worth looking at how Yanbal came to operate in Ecuador and how

it became the leader in its fi eld Founded in Peru in 1967, the company

recently celebrated thirty years of doing business in Ecuador Like many

DSOs such as U.S.-based Mary Kay, the image of Yanbal is closely linked

to that of its founder, Fernando Belmont According to Yanbal’s general

manager in Ecuador, Belmont learned about direct sales during his

col-lege education in the United States, thought that the model could be

suc-cessful in Latin America, and returned to Peru to found Yanbal Belmont

later emigrated to Argentina, launching Yanbal subsidiaries in Chile,

Ec-uador, Colombia, and Mexico When he returned to Peru, he founded a

company he called Unique, due to confl icts over rights to the name

Yan-bal between Belmont and his brothers (who had taken over YanYan-bal when he

left the country) Belmont’s company has grown in terms of revenue and

the number of offi cial distributors and has expanded geographically

To-day Yanbal operates in seven Latin American countries: Bolivia,

Colom-bia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela There are more

than 500,000 Yanbal consultants in these countries (Yanbal n.d.) In 2006,

Yanbal decided to follow the waves of Ecuadorians migrating to Spain, and

currently 3,000 women are working as Yanbal beauty consultants in that

country (Correa and Velasco 2007, 126) There is talk of expanding to the

United States, with its large populations of immigrants from Latin

Amer-ica, many of whom already know Yanbal/Unique products from their home

countries.13

Yanbal was named number forty-six on a recent list of Ecuador’s fi ve

hundred largest companies, compiled by the national news magazine

Vistazo (Correa and Velasco 2007) The company’s sales increased 24

per-cent from 2005 to 2006, with reported revenues of $125 million In the

personal care and beauty sector, Yanbal is the second-highest seller, just

be-hind the multi national corporation Unilever and beating out not only Avon

and other DSOs but also Colgate Palmolive, Procter & Gamble, and

John-son & JohnJohn-son (ibid.) The company was one of the fi fteen named “most

respected” in Ecuador by the business magazine Líderes in 2007 Yanbal

Ecuador is the second-best company to work for in Ecuador, according to a

new survey of employees (not distributors) by the organization Great Place

to Work (Vistazo 2008, 33) It is the most recognizable brand name in

cos-metics and has the largest market share of fragrances (Escobar 2006b, 27;

Hoy 2005) In the realm of direct selling, Yanbal’s major competitors in

Ec-uador are Avon (a U.S.-based multinational), L’Bel (formerly called Ebel, a

Peruvian company owned by Fernando Belmont’s brother), and Orifl ame

(a Swedish company)

D I R E C T S A L E S A S I N F O R M A L “WOM E N’S WO R K”

Women’s work must be examined in relation to their economic alternatives

in a given setting What would they be doing if they weren’t selling? Is

di-rect selling seen as more gender-appropriate than other types of work? Is

direct selling the only income-generating activity distributors are engaged

in, or is it one piece of a multipronged economic strategy on the part of the

woman and/or the household? These questions are drawn from the

litera-ture on women and work in developing countries, and they go beyond the

tendency to categorize women’s work as formal or informal, part-time or

full-time

The informal economy in Latin America, as elsewhere in the ing world, has exploded in the last few decades (Benería 2003; Benería and

develop-Feldman 1992; Portes, Castells, and Benton 2004) Women in the paid

la-bor force are disproportionately engaged in informal work, which accounts

for 51 percent of all employment in Latin America (Benería 2003; ILO

2002) Women’s “multiple income strategies” (Rothstein 1995) often

in-clude participation in both formal and informal employment either

simulta-neously (as in Freeman 2000) or at different times, as well as multiple forms

of informal employment (Weiss 1997, 21) and combinations of “wage labor

and self-employment as well as temporary migration” (Benería 2003, 112)

In some households, the informal economy is the primary source of

in-come, with formal employment complementing or supplementing informal

earnings (Pérez-Alemán 1992) Such a combination of strategies, and the

appeal of informal sector work, can be explained in part by women’s

pri-mary responsibility for caring for the home and family, which “continues

to have an impact on their choices and ability to participate in paid

produc-tion” (Benería 2003, 119) In addition, neoliberal economic policies have

made the daily tasks of what some scholars would call “social

reproduc-tion” more diffi cult by reducing government support and social programs

(Benería 2003; Lind 2005; Moser 1989) Feminist economists including

Lourdes Benería and Nancy Folbre have examined the economic and

so-cial value of women’s unpaid domestic work and “care work”14 as part of a

growing body of feminist research that Benería (2003) has called the

“ac-counting for women’s work project.” This unpaid work affects women’s

participation in informal as well as formal labor markets (a topic further

ex-plored in chapter 1)

Is direct selling an informal economic activity? It is not highly regulated

by commercial laws, and distributors are nominally self-employed rather

than being offi cial employees of DSOs, meaning that they are not

guaran-teed job security and do not receive health insurance or other benefi ts

(El-son 1999, 616) In addition to the distributors who are offi cially registered

with the companies, there are also legions of people who informally “help”

these offi cial distributors in various ways Thus, there are degrees of

in-formality in the business of direct selling.15 Yet informal and formal

eco-nomic activities and actors are often connected As Linda Seligmann puts

it in her description of the informal sector in Peru, “the chain of

inter-mediaries within the informal market economy is closely intertwined with

the production and sales processes of formal economy businesses, and the

chain itself facilitates the circulation of products in an ineffi cient economy”

(2004, 87)

Despite the informal aspects of their sales forces, DSOs do have legally

employed staff, from janitors and factory workers in manufacturing plants

to accountants and experts in marketing and psychology In addition,

di-rect sales differs in important ways from other activities commonly called

informal, such as market selling or illicit activities like prostitution Direct

selling organizations, and the activity of direct selling itself, seem to have

a foot in both the informal and formal economy, an increasingly common

situation as the “neat dichotomies between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ work

are breaking down” (Elson 1999, 617) In terms of the actual daily

activi-ties and the lack of a fi xed workplace, direct selling looks most like informal

work In the case of direct sales and similar types of work, artifi cial

concep-tual boundaries between work done in the “public” sphere and work done

in “private” become less relevant

In some developing countries, direct selling is an increasingly attractive

income-earning strategy, especially for women, due to its ease of entry and

self-directed work process Direct sales organizations benefi t from cultural

norms and structural forces that steer women away from full-time jobs in

the formal economy, and they also benefi t from the material conditions

that lead to women’s need to earn an income The fi ndings of this study

underline the importance of examining direct sales as a rapidly

expand-ing type of work, a formal-informal hybrid that appeals mainly to women

and helps promote the expansion of consumer capitalism around the world

The women whose experiences are presented here are part of the

“feminiza-tion of labor” (Standing 1999) occurring in developing countries, yet their

work takes place largely outside the formal economy and outside the

proto-typical globalized workplace of the export processing factory.16 As in-depth

studies of formal sector employment have shown, women’s work must be

considered not only in terms of the needs and discourses of transnational

corporations but also in relation to locally produced ideals of gender and

locally specifi c social and economic conditions (Bank Muñoz 2008;

Free-man 2000; FriedeFree-mann-Sánchez 2006; Salzinger 2003)

DS OS A S G E N D E R E D O RG A N IZ AT I O N SAccording to sociologist Pei-Chia Lan, DSOs are “often portrayed as

homelike settings characterized by horizontal cooperation and affective

bonds, in contrast to other workplaces governed by the principles of

bu-reaucracy and competition” (2002, 165) Indeed, social scientists studying

these companies often insist on their differences from more “typical”

capi-talist fi rms.17 Biggart argues that the mixing of family and work and the

as-signing of familial terms to work relationships leads to a “‘feminine’ form

of organization qualitatively distinct from ‘masculine’ forms” (1989, 71)

This familial aspect is clearly seen in Yanbal, with its “mother” directors

and their “daughters” and “granddaughters.” Hierarchies are based on

rec-ognition of achievement rather than authority or control over subordinates,

and the emphasis is on creating a supportive and noncompetitive

environ-ment in which all distributors can succeed, according to Biggart’s model

Around the time of the publication of Biggart’s Charismatic ism (1989), feminist thinkers were beginning to elaborate theories about

Capital-the masculine character of organizations in U.S society RaCapital-ther than

view-ing bureaucratic and administrative structures as gender-neutral and

ra-tional, and seeing the human inhabitants of these structures as gendered,

Joan Acker (1990), Dorothy Smith (1989), and others urged us to consider

the possibility that organizations themselves were gendered This gendered

character was evidenced by such phenomena as the persistent gendered

di-vision of labor within organizations and the symbols, images, and language

that upheld such divisions The image of the ideal worker in management

and business literature was masculine; that is, only men tended to lack

do-mestic and outside responsibilities, a precondition for “existing only for the

work” as the business discourse demanded Acker envisioned an alternative

to masculine organizations, a type of fi rm that would value care work, have

no hierarchy, and “where work and intimate relations are closely related”

(1990, 155)

Some direct selling organizations, in particular those with a primarily

female workforce, appear to be a type of gendered organization that is not

masculine For one thing, these companies explicitly and symbolically

de-fi ne themselves as feminine, and are “unabashedly women’s worlds”

(Big-gart 1989, 93) Avon calls itself “the company for women.” Mary Kay’s

sig-nature color is pink, down to the Cadillacs awarded to top distributors

Tupperware is associated with a traditional domesticity centered on the

kitchen and the feeding of the family In the past few decades, these

femi-nine organizational identities have left the companies open to criticism by

feminists and satire by drag queens and others who enjoy toying with

gen-der stereotypes (Vincent 2003)

In these organizations, as in Yanbal, the consumer is generally assumed

to be a woman, as is the distributor Yanbal actually requires that

prospec-tive distributors be female, although resourceful Ecuadorian men have

found ways around this restriction (see chapter 2) Unlike many economic

organizations, these DSOs are built on the assumption that the selling

in-teraction is an all-female one, with a female seller and a female consumer

In the catalogs of cosmetics DSOs, most products are oriented toward

adult women, with a much smaller selection of items for men and children

This hyperfeminine image obscures not only the actual involvement of men

in the creation and distribution of Yanbal products but also the realities of

the customer base, which, according to Yanbal Ecuador’s general manager

Robert Watson, is 54 percent male According to distributors, male

cus-tomers buy items for themselves (especially colognes) and for the women in

their lives Some sellers told me that they prefer to have men as customers

because they pay more promptly; according to these distributors, male

cli-ents are embarrassed by the thought of owing money to a woman

The working conditions of distributors for women-oriented companies

seem to support Biggart’s assertion that direct selling organizations are

“feminine.” Direct selling organizations that target women to be sellers

stress the fl exible nature of the work and the opportunity to combine

in-come-generating activities with domestic responsibilities As Biggart points

out, “being able to care for family needs and work at the same time serves

both the material and emotional needs of women” (1989, 58) Rather than

supporting the traditional division of work from home, and public from

pri-vate, DSOs “claim to offer an alternative to the model of separate spheres”

(ibid., 72)

The appeal to women who need to earn money but feel obliged to take